Chapter 141 – Gentrification
[Three Months Later]
Jack let his feet dangle off the city wall as he laid back and stared up at the cracked moon hanging high in the sky. His chest heaved in and out as his desperate gasps for air filled the quiet night. He flinched with every breath he took.
Not broken… more like shattered, Jack thought with a tender touch to the left side of his ribcage. The left side of his body felt like a broken bag of bones. He pulled out a health potion, giving it a quick inspection before he downed the contents.
The potion was brownish red and had an unseasoned beef broth flavor with a heavy acidic aftertaste that was becoming commonplace for anything that Nutt made. Admittedly, the goblin had gotten pretty good at making potions now that he had proper materials to work with. For the longest time Jack had thought he was bluffing. He was only now starting to appreciate the goblins’ skill for potion making.
He continued to nurse the potion as he brought his breathing back under control. Soon the frantic beating of his heart quit pounding in his head, and he took note of skittering feet across the ground behind him. Jack rolled over slowly, careful not to put too much pressure on his still healing ribs. Wiggleworm was eating away at a large leather belt, pulling it deeper into mouth with her many feet and large fangs.
“Hey,” Jack said, “I thought I told you to ask before you eat.”
Wiggleworm stared back at him with her beady little bug eyes. Her antenna whipped back and forth like a cat’s tail when it was ready to pounce. Jack rolled his eyes at the bug -- that was her equivalent of “I do whatever the fuck I want”. Jack gave one more look at the belt she was eating and tried to put it out of his mind. She had a knack for always choosing the most valuable item that had dropped and eating it. She had grown to roughly the size of a rattlesnake now that Jack had started to feed her various magic items. To his surprise, she even ate weapons too, although he was yet to have any luck getting her to turn into something that even remotely resembled a usable weapon.
He stood up slowly and inspected the remnants of the battle that had just taken place. Signs of a brutal struggle lined the top of the wall in both directions. Black scorch marks from powerful blasts of magic were seared into the wall. Icicles jutted out of the stone, staunchly refusing to melt away. Deep gouges from heavy axes and shattered stone from massive hammers ran all along the wall. Blood of black and red was painted all across the battlefield. Thirteen arbiters lay dead, with Jack as their executioner.
He was used to the arbiters coming at him in packs of two or three down in the city, and they were always a welcome challenge. It wasn’t until the fights against them got easier and easier that Jack decided to take the fight to them. He made his way back up to the wall, remembering the arbiters that had been their to greet him upon breaking into the city. He was met with five. Then eight more showed up. Things got ugly for him fast.
Still, he had somewhat prevailed, if not a little broken and bruised himself. The image of Cumberlin carelessly ripping through the arbiters kept replaying in his mind. He needed to be at least that strong, and he wasn’t quite there yet he thought with an annoyed look back down at the city. Things weren’t going as fast as he had hoped.
Jack was starting to realize that life in the Tower moved with an uncaring, almost lethargic pace. His hope was to be done with this floor relatively quickly. It had been three months now and he hadn’t even left sector six of the city he was tasked with conquering.
Luckily. Everyone else seemed to be having the same problems he was—the sector danger upgrades had fucked everyone pretty hard.
“Wiggle. Let’s go.” Jack took a step up to the side of the wall that overlooked the city. Wiggle crawled up his body and wrapped him in a cloak that trailed behind him a cloak of darkness, and Jack descended into the city, the centipede of sector six.
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[Hannah]
Hannah stared at the quest board, a vein pulsing in her forehead that had never been there before.
“He finally did it! He broke a hundred million!” one of the newest idiots screamed. Cheers erupted and the quest board was suddenly swarmed with faction members attempting to push past her to get a view of Jack’s latest feat of strength.
The quest board for sector six was littered with a dozen or so bounties. It was discovered by Jack that whenever you kill an arbiter you get a bounty of a million AP placed on your head. When you kill an arbiter a second time, that bounty increases by another million, and so on and so forth. Jack was currently treating the bounty system as a scoreboard, and he had the highest score of 107,000,000AP.
To make matters worse, he got it in his head that anyone capable of killing an arbiter deserved to be an officer within the faction. This resulted in a fair number of their members dying extremely stupid deaths.
Still, his little challenge had shown some interesting results. Devin, much to her surprise, had the second highest bounty at 63,000,000AP. He constantly griped that it would be higher if Hannah wasn’t weighing him down with so many administrative duties. The next closest behind him was an orc named Gaiju at 37,000,000AP. After that there were about a dozen or so people who had managed to pull off killing an arbiter, with the highest among them earning a 9,000,000AP bounty. Hannah didn’t participate. Instead, she freely offered duels to anyone who felt her spot at second in command wasn’t earned. Jack stepped in and beheaded the first person stupid enough to actually challenge her.
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Hannah glanced around at the members of their faction partying in the common hall. Jack had earned himself a cult like following of maniacs. The disenfranchised, the abandoned, the shamed, the outcasts, the weirdos. They all found a place in Jack’s faction. It wasn’t just humans either. It was orcs. Elves of every variety, and it started to give Hannah a headache because of just how many different types existed. They even had a few summer elves, although they had to join under threat of soul oaths. Nutt had even started recruiting, forming a faction of his own within the faction known as ‘The Little Alliance’. It consisted of anything under three feet tall–mostly gnomes.
It took Hannah a while to figure out the common thread that bound everyone together here. It wasn’t Jack necessarily, but his outright hatred for the Tower that everyone seemed to rally behind. Everyone here had a story about how the Tower fucked them over, and beneath the endless fighting, drinking, and partying that seemed to be a major theme within their faction, was a deadly hatred that fueled most everybody here.
Hannah weaved her way out of the common room and through the halls of their new fortress. It was a simple building on the outside. Essentially a giant square building of concrete several feet thick that cost them roughly 15000 City coins to construct. They had a few options on what sort of fortress they could build, and Hannah opted on the maze fortress. Inside was filled with hallways that lead nowhere. Stairs that never ended, fake rooms, trap doors, a constantly shifting labyrinth of chaos. If you joined the faction you gained the ability to navigate the maze-like building making for a pretty strong natural defense. Part of the reason Hannah had picked this particular fortress was she heard a rumor that the Twilight Lord who ruled over sector two also had a maze fortress. She had hoped to discern some of its secrets as they were eventually going to have to kill him.
Hannah made her way into her office, only to be met by Gaiju the orc and Devin waiting patiently inside. She glanced at Gaiju and the massive cleaver sitting in her lap. As far as orcs went, she seemed old. She wasn’t as big or brawny as all the other orcs she had met. Her green skin was long faded and was riddled with cracks. She was holding off on a race upgrade because she liked being an old lady for some reason. She was equal parts wise and insane, claiming she could commune with spirits. Hannah found herself liking the orc.
“What are you two doing here?” Hannah asked.
“The spirits are singing to me,” Gaiju grinned, “The lightning centipede is feasting tonight!”
Hannah narrowed her eyes at Gaiju, then glanced over at Devin. “Translation?” she asked.
“We saw Jack finally hit 100,000,000 million bounty. Does that mean we can finally leave?”
Hannah moved past them and plopped down into her chair with a sigh. “Who knows what he’s thinking. My guess would be yes, but you might honestly be more informed than me on this one. How does he seem?”
“His daggers strike with a judgment of finality. The dark tempest that rages inside him is crying for release. This city will soon fall to a judgment of lightning and death,” Gaiju cackled.
Hannah let out another small sigh. It seemed like she was only going to be getting insane Gaiju instead of wise Gaiju. She looked over at Devin once more for a translation.
“I can’t keep up with him anymore. He’s been able to decisively beat me for the past month or so.”
“Even with your sword?”
“Even with my sword,” Devin admitted, an annoyed frown forming on his face.
Hannah nodded at Devin. He had been a true mystery in all of this. She never really bothered getting to know him on the first floor because he was a major asshole. The more she learned about him now though the more confused she got. As far as she could tell he was just a regular guy. Back on Earth he was a beat cop who also had a bit of military experience under his belt. Hannah was pretty positive he wasn’t lying about his past, which made his presence in the Tower all the more ridiculous. The fact that he could evenly duel against Jack was a notion she had trouble accepting for a long time. Jack seemed unbothered by it for the most part, but it bugged Hannah to no end.
Best she could figure, Devin was one of those rare geniuses with the sword. It was nothing other than pure dumb luck on his part that Earth got pulled into the Tower and he actually had an excuse to pick up and use a sword. Still, he had proven useful, even helpful so far, and Hannah wasn’t going to just throw away a genius because she was suspicious of him.
“Any idea where Kain is?”
“We checked in with the painted shell about two weeks ago. They’ll be back in another week or so.”
Hannah leaned back in her chair thinking through everything. The past three months had been hard. Not only had the danger level upgrade made everything dramatically more dangerous, but their own upgrades to the city seemed to make the monsters deadlier.
If you looked outside at sector six now, you wouldn’t recognize it from when she had first arrived. The sector reminded Hannah of a weird mixture between the favelas in Brazil and Brooklyn. One of the first upgrades she made was to the city streets. This turned broken cobblestone roads into smooth blocks of pavement. This in turn upgraded the speed of the zombies one step further. Her reason for doing this was because it made it so there was a random chance that every zombie killed could earn their faction a city coin, improving their passive farming. It also dramatically increased the AP earned from zombies, and even added random items into their drop tables.
Her next upgrade was to the houses themselves. They went from shitty stacked houses composed of rusted metal and rotten wood to concrete buildings that turned the city into a maze of dark alleyways if you strayed off the main roads. This also served to upgrade the ghouls that plagued the rooftops, providing much the same benefits that the zombies did.
After that she was gradually able to increase the number of quests available in the sector, provide several trading outposts which acted a sort of safe haven throughout the sector, and even came with quests to escort Tower generated traders to and from the outposts.
From there, the city coins they earned exploded and they were able to afford their fortress within the month. Once the fortress was built the tortuga were granted leave to go farm beast cores outside the city until they were actually needed.
“Alright. I’ll need to finalize the list of who’s staying in the sector and who’s leaving. I’ve already got an upgrade plan for Kain to follow once we give him back control of the sector. Beyond that, If Jack is ready then we should start preparing to leave. It’s time we took over another sector of this city,” Hannah grinned.